Mapping Bike Accidents in R

At last weekend’s Hack Ta Ville event here in Montreal, I joined up with some talented urban planners and web devs to realize Vélobstacles. The idea of the project is to crowd source information on cycling conditions around the city. As with any crowd sourcing project, we were faced with the problem of seeding the site with some data to draw the attention of users to get the ball rolling.

Fortunately, we had access to a data set of all reported cycling accidents between 2006-2010. Once we seeded Vélobstacles with this data, the web devs went to town adding features to the site, and I had outlived my usefulness as a data geek. So I decided to play with the accident data a little and produce some visualization. I plotted all the accidents on a map and animated it through time. I also calculated and plotted the monthly accident rate using a moving average.

Be sure to select HD quality:

Not surprisingly, the accident rate goes way up in the summer months as Montreal winters are braved on two wheels by only a rarefied few. What is interesting is the mid-summer dip in the accident rate. This dip is notably correlated with Montreal’s much beloved construction holiday – though the causal relationship is unclear. If you have any alternative explanations, or an idea about how to test the construction holiday hypothesis, drop a note in the comments.